TIM
BOUCHER is a freelance author living in Seattle, WA,
USA. He ran the popular website, Pop Occulture, known
for its compelling analysis and community-driven
conversation on the fringes of pop culture and its
intersection with religion, spirituality, conspiracy
theory, psychology, psychedelics

and
the paranormal.

Blessed is he who has a
soul,

blessed is he who has none,

but woe and grief to him

who has it in embryo. 1G.I.
Gurdjieff

The United States Declaration of Independence proudly
proclaims the mystical truth that,

"all men are created
equal."

What happens after that,
though, is anybody's guess.

Once we've been created
equally,

Does that mean
all our lives are the same?

Do the essential
differences between us come from genetics, environment, free
will, the soul?

Do we all end up
in the same place again when we die?

These questions have
excited the myth-making faculties of humankind from antiquity down
through to the present day.

Working for a
Soul

The esoteric teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, in many ways, fly
in the face of traditional Western religious thought.

Whereas it is accepted as
a given within Judeo-Christian tradition that each human is born
with a soul, Gurdjieff does not let us off so easy. Active in the
early part of the 20th century, this Greek-Armenian
mystic travelled the world, synthesizing spiritual disciplines into
a unique path called
The Fourth Way.

He taught that human
existence is a kind of waking sleep, in which we live more or less
automatically, unconscious and unaware of ourselves.

He even went to the
extreme of suggesting that humans are not born with souls at all,
and that we can only create one while alive through intense personal
suffering and what he called "work."

If we are not successful
in this venture, he taught that our identities would not survive the
shock of death, that we would "die like dogs" and that the
ever-hungry Moon would gobble up
our energy as part of its own evolution of consciousness.

It's a teaching which sounds strange to most people today, but which
was perhaps more common to the ancient world.

Those who say they
will die first and then rise are in error. If they do not first
receive the resurrection while they live, when they die they
will receive nothing. 2

Like the other Gnostic
texts recovered at Nag Hammadi, this type of information was
declared heretical, banned and except for in a few lucky cases,
completely destroyed by the early Catholic Church in an effort to
consolidate both its teachings and its power structure.

The
Catholic story-system pivots around the idea that we will
be resurrected at the end of time, not transmuted to higher levels
of understanding and awareness here in our lifetimes.

The Gnostic texts, on the
other hand, seem to teach that humans are born with a spark of
divinity which can either be left undeveloped or guarded and fanned
into a full-on blaze.

With the popularity of books like the
Da Vinci Code, and a renewed
interest in Gnosticism, many people today are left wondering why
these alternative esoteric Christian teachings were so viciously
eradicated.

Who benefits by
suppressing this ancient gnosis, and what happens to those of us
left in the dark as a result?

If Gurdjieff and the Gospel of Philip are at all correct in their
teachings, then it may be that by waiting for our reward in the
afterlife, by not working feverishly on our souls like a life
raft on Gilligan's Island, then we are lost. We miss our chance. We
remain soulless automatons, vanishing at death or being consumed by
insidious forces (if not well before then).

The
Inauthentic Human

Science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick saw something very
similar to this scenario happening in today's world.

Through the lens of
trashy sci-fi novels, he explored questions of what is ultimately
real, and what constitutes the authentic human. He used outlandish
and bizarre plot devices to fling his characters through inverted
realities and distorted mindscapes.

And from his
explorations, he came to believe that:

… [T]he bombardment
of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very
quickly, spurious humans - as fake as the data pressing at them
from all sides...

Fake realities will
create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities
and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually,
into forgeries of themselves.

So we wind up with
fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to
other fake humans. 3

Similar themes appear in
popular and fringe culture.

In the movie The Matrix, we see a false
reality maintained by mysterious agents who can slip in and out of
the bodies of ordinary people as though they were clothing.

The paranormal
investigations of people like John Keel, Jacques Vallee and others also
posit the existence of ultraterrestrials, a race of entities who
evolved right alongside us on the planet Earth.

They are thought to
camouflage themselves, adapting imagery pulled from the human minds
and cultures they interact with.

In other words, they
appeared to the ancients as angels and demons, to
medieval people as fairies and goblins, and to us
today as alien visitors.

Others threaten that the
soulless human can play host to
these and other types of entities and energies, acting as a sort of
empty vessel, or organic portal. 4

"giving us their
mind" which is filled with "covetousness, greed, and cowardice,"
and which keeps us "complacent, routinary and egomaniacal."
5

Unfortunately for us
though, it is not just science fiction authors and occultists
who have explored ideas like this.

In "real life," similar
notions of humans as fundamentally without soul took root among
psychologists who espoused the philosophies of Behaviourism
and Eliminative Materialism in the middle part of the 20th
century.

In short, these thinkers
(perhaps paradoxically) believed that internal human states were
nothing but a fiction, a primitive "folk psychology," and that only
externally observable behavior had any real significance.

They saw concepts such as
belief, desire, fear, love - even the mind and soul -
as untenable, unscientific and therefore ultimately unreal and
useless.

Noted Behaviourist
B.F. Skinner encapsulated the quest to abolish "inner man" in
his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, with this chilling
passage:

What is being
abolished is autonomous man - the inner man, the homunculus, the
possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom
and dignity.

His abolition has long been overdue.

Autonomous man is a
device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way.
He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our
understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed
vanishes.

Science does not
dehumanize man, it de-homunculises him, and it must do so if it
is to prevent the abolition of the human species. To man qua man
we readily say good riddance.

Only by dispossessing
him can we turn to real causes of human behavior.

Only then can we turn
from the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous to the
natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable. 6

At first glance, strong
thematic similarities tie together the cores of Skinner's and
esoteric philosophies such as that of Gurdjieff.

Applied to world events,
it may help explain the inhuman atrocities we see played out on the
global scale every day.

On the other hand though,
we have folks like Gurdjieff who follow in the footsteps of the
ancient Gnostics, and after introducing us to our fundamental
dilemma rather than celebrating it, chart for us a way out of the
shackles of an empty, automatic and manipulable existence.

Is God Insane?
In his ground-breaking 1967 book, The Politics of Experience,
psychiatrist R.D. Laing put forward the still-revolutionary
idea that mental illness is not illness at all.

Instead, it is (or can
be) a healing process whereby an individual overcomes the
impossibility of their own situation, and the insanity of the
culture at large. In his vision, it was not individual humans who
were fundamentally disturbed, but the culture which was dangerous
and insane, warping and distorting the natural human into the
artificial confines of local cultural existence.

Ancient Gnostics took this idea several steps further.

Certain sects taught that
this material world was created by the Demiurge, an insane
creator god who was conceived in error, and who egotistically took
himself to be the only true god.

Tradition identifies him
either as the angry
Yahweh of the Old Testament ("Thou
shalt have no other gods before me"), as Satan in his role as
Prince of this world, or with more overtly Gnostic variants such
as,

Yaldabaoth

Samael

Saklas

Philip K. Dick
mythologized this hierarchy of institutional insanity into what he
called the Black Iron Prison, which is
ruled over by a never-ending, infinitely destructive Empire.

In his Tractates
Cryptica Scriptura, 7 an esoteric addendum to his
novel VALIS, he wrote,

"The Empire is the
institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and
imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a
violent one."

Thus it would seem that
the only rational course for an individual to become and stay sane
is to overcome his culture, his society, and maybe even God
himself (or at least the deranged being which the Gnostics believed
masquerades as God).

"Against the Empire,"
Dick continued, "is posed the living information, the plasmate
or physician…"

Dick identified this
cosmic force with the Holy Spirit, the Christian concept of
the Logos, or the divine Word (hence, living
information) which was made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

Like the ancient
Gnostics, Dick believed that this divine entity - the plasmate -
could fuse with, not just Jesus, but with potentially anyone
who was worthy.

There is no indication
that Dick believed humans fundamentally lacked souls, but he seems
to have believed that the plasmate healed and restored people to
sanity, and to their natural whole state.

The Secret
Gray-Robed Christians
Dick himself underwent a series of transformative spiritual
experiences which formed the basis of his understanding of the human
situation.

In his novels VALIS
and Radio Free Albemuth, he
fictionalized these experiences, describing numerous encounters in
dreams, hallucinations and waking life with a benevolent higher
order entity which he variously described as a cosmic artificial
intelligence, ancient alien beings, the living information of the
plasmate, and of divinity itself.

Both his fictional
characters and he himself underwent extreme pain, personal turmoil
and intense soul-searching, which perhaps could be correlated to
what Gurdjieff meant as the "work" required to fashion oneself a
soul or subtle body with which to escape the obliteration of death.

The exact nature of that work seems to deal with cultivating an
intense awareness and a sustained "presence" within oneself at all
times - as opposed to absent-mindedness, or living on auto-pilot,
which seems to be the natural state of affairs.

Here we may once again
turn to the ancient Gnostics for inspiration and amplification.

When the life-spirit
increases and the illuminating power of the body strengthens the
soul, no one can lead you astray into the lessening of your
humanity.

But those on whom the
counterfeit spirit preys are alienated from humanity and
deviated… 8

In Dick's worlds, once
you have crossed that threshold and reconnected to the universal
soul (or created a soul, as Gurdjieff's teachings might indicate),
others who have done the same will be revealed to you, so that you
may strengthen one another and work toward a common goal.

In VALIS, Dick referred
to these kindred spirits as Secret Gray Robed Christians (or
homoplasmates - those who had "cross-bonded" with the living
information of Christ or the Holy Spirit, thereby
attaining eternal life).

Upon their shoulders lay
the immense task of nothing less than the overthrow of the Black
Iron Prison itself:

Who had built the
prison - and why - he could not say.

But he could discern
one good thing: the prison lay under attack.

An organization of
Christians, not regular Christians such as those who attended
church every Sunday and prayed, but secret early Christians
wearing light gray-colored robes, had started an assault on the
prison, and with success.

The secret, early
Christians were filled with joy. Fat, in his madness, understood
the reason for their joy.

This time the early,
secret, gray-robed Christians would get the prison, rather than
the other way around. 9

The idea that not all
humans have souls is a fascinating line of thought which invariably
leads to dangerous and even violent territory when employed by the
agents of Empire.

One need look no further
than Nazi Germany's wholesale execution of what they claimed were
the "sub-human" Jews as vivid examples of the extravagant danger of
these ideas.

It is one thing to
explore mystical truth for the purposes of personal development; it
is quite another altogether to use it as an excuse and explanation
for violent, thoughtless, and inhuman action.

The choice, ultimately, seems to rest in the hands of the individual
as to whether or not we develop our divine spark into a full-fledged
soul, or if we let it languish in darkness.

We may all be created
equal, but what do we do after that?

The 12th
century Sufi, Farid ud-Din Attar, in his "Conference of the
Birds," offered the following:

A Sufi woke one night
and said to himself,

"It seems to me
that the world is like a chest in which we are all put and
the lid is shut down, and we give ourselves up to
foolishness.

When death lifts
the lid, he who has acquired wings, soars away to eternity,
but he who has not, stays in the chest a prey to a thousand
tribulations.

Make sure then
that the bird of ambition acquires wings of aspiration, and
give to your heart and reason the ecstasy of the soul.

Before the lid of
the chest is opened become a bird of the spirit, ready to
spread your wings." 10